Description
Poetry. "It's very rare to watch the birth of a new style. It's like watching through a new set of Proust's kaleidoscopes. Mark Statman has been working for years on a vision of himself and parts of the city concentrated and bare as any poetry. It's hard to compare it to anything except a commentary on the real and the imagined pointillist poems almost without figures and adjectives and false decorations. But it all adds up, like a fire hydrant taken by Rudy Burkhardt, because everything is unexaggerated, convincing as a street sign. He has gotten away from any lyric leftovers, and in his anti-anti-poems he makes a lot of magic and music out of elegies of a city mouse. He has a family, a loved wife, and son, and a past he has a constant politics and is not seduced by the political. He makes us bewildered tourists at his everyday miracle"--David Shapiro.
"TOURIST AT A MIRACLE is a big title to live up to. Mark Statman delivers the tourist's wonder and distance in spare, deliberate music American poetry's grand plain style descended from William Carlos Williams and James Schuyler. His miracles are those we all experience if we have our eyes and feelings open love, friendship, fatherhood, loss, anxieties, frustrations, fears...the everyday and always. Statman is a head-on poet willing to risk clarity in pursuit of the marvelous we might encounter anywhere."
—William Corbett
"'The letters glow like ghosts' concludes Mark Statman's poem 'Losing Buttons' which is a memorable and a signifying cipher of how every gesture and commonplace, every person and place known has its negative, reverse, absent 'one left out,' the 'what I m not seeing' 'second question.' The poems in TOURIST AT A MIRACLE attend to the enigma of how it is 'the other half is still unknown' imply the indescribable silence and loss when the baseball game on the radio is suddenly turned off. Yet, evident, everyday things are engaged with, loved and seen. 'Yellow Jerusalem artichoke/Jesse said.' The hard, fast quick chasms of Statman's particular urban topography register in a stripped down intimacy that shares a propensity with James Schuyler for splices of weather, signals of season 'winter facts' obliquely seen. These poems compel us to notice instances of being in shorthand like (my favorite) 'syrup, algebra, love' amid the 'heights, lost, heights / resolve, view, found.'"
—Kimberly Lyons
"The way to redeem the world, Mark Statman writes, 'is not to fall in love / but to stay in love / to use the word love / every day in your life / and mean it.' How surprising, and how wonderful, to find a poet who builds meaning this way, and insists on meaning what love means. In TOURIST AT A MIRACLE, Statman gives us language as commitment, commitment as imagination, imagination as soul-making. Statman has translated Lorca brilliantly, and here he gives us a version of New York that Lorca would recognize and welcome. This book is a delight."
—Joseph Lease
Author Bio
Mark Statman has written eleven books. Among them are the poetry collections EXILE HOME (Lavender Ink, 2019), That Train Again (Lavender Ink, 2015), A Map of the Winds (Lavender Ink, 2013) and TOURIST AT A MIRACLE (Hanging Loose, 2010). His translations include NEVER MADE IN AMERICA: SELECTED POEMS OF MARTIN BAREA MATTOS (Dialogos, 2017), Black Tulips: The Selected Poems of José María Hinojosa (University of New Orleans Press, 2012), and, with Pablo Medina, a translation of Federico García Lorca's Poet in New York (Grove 2008). Statman's poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in twenty-one anthologies, as well as such publications as New American Writing, Tin House, Tupelo Quarterly, Hanging Loose, Ping Pong, Xavier Review, and American Poetry Review. A recipient of awards from the NEA and the National Writers Project, he is Emeritus Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, and lives in San Pedro Ixtlahuaca and Oaxaca de Juá rez, MX.
Author City: Brooklyn, NY USA